Hali Dardar is an enrolled member of the United Houma Nation, and co-founder of the Houma Language Project and Bvlbancha Public Access. Her works explore interaction design, new media art, and community process. Past interaction design projects include the 2021 and 2023 Indigenous Gulf Streams, Ripple Effect’s Water Glossaries, and both the Unrecognized Stories and Language Keeper interview series.

Dardar’s residency project, Imagining Leveys explores how Gulf South communities can maintain sovereignty and security of their futures while collaborating with external partners to create stories. Dardar’s residency will continue to explore an existing stream of work which designs a conceptual interaction for equitable story exchange by approaching the interview process as a market transaction rather than a relational exchange. Exploring and expanding this conceptual interaction around the rematriation of content provides a space for a larger discussion of ownership as it pertains to the vast intangible corpus of lived experiential knowledge. The project aims to open this larger dialogue through a public event along with small group idea collage sessions with digital and film story tellers, archive professionals, and legal counsel.

Headshot by Akasha Rabut